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All photos in this post are by Jorge. Find more of his work on his website.
I call my mom early in the morning while running straight up the side of a mountain in Oaxaca. “We’re going to see the devils,” I explain. “They start coming out a week before Carnival.” I realize I don’t know what Carnival actually signifies, or even if it happens before or after Lent. I promise to investigate.
As we sit drinking a Corona and eating fried peanuts at a roadside stand, I ask Jorge why the devils. Why this. He shrugs. “It’s practice,” he says.
The devils come out in Tilcajete a week before Carnival actually begins. They are mostly village boys and men, though now a few women join them. They coat themselves in motor oil, cooking oil, and floor paint, rendering their skin a gleaming, eerie obsidian or rust. They wear horns, masks, and bells. You can hear them coming a mile away, the jangling of a half-dozen metal cowbells around a slicked waist signifying approaching chaos. They jog slowly and menacingly and if you stare at them too long, or if it’s getting late in the day and they’re feisty with beer, they’ll come smear you with grease. They were gentle with Elena and me, coming just close enough to make us shriek, then extending a single blackened finger as if to say: truce. Taint yourselves, and we’ll spare you. We accepted.
Carnival has its roots in bacchanalia and saturnalia, delightful words signifying drunken, wild Roman festivals that celebrated the changing of the seasons. Contemporary Carnival in Mexico is a quintessential syncretic merging of indigenous ritual and Spanish Catholic tradition: the cyclical release and abandon of fiesta with the cosmology of devils and saints, sin and redemption, rules and rule-breakers. The Spanish originally tried to crush the Carnival, as they did most things that involved fireworks, mezcal, color, chaos, and joy, but eventually they came to understand it as a necessary period of release. The Carnival is a time when hierarchies are subverted, mocked, and challenged; when the body, collective and individual, takes over from the thinking mind and its reason and order; when the rigidity of everyday personas and ways of being dissolves into wild possibility. It is a time of extreme play and creativity before the austerity of Lent. It is an essential letting-go, which even as order returns in Lent and then Good Friday and Easter, leaves its wild traces.
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